If you were to catalog just the subjects featured in the Metropolitan’s “The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini,” a nicely timed Christmas blockbuster that’s newly arrived from Berlin’s Bode-Museum, you’d see the resemblance to a slick ad campaign in Vanity Fair: Everybody on the walls is an ideally beautiful young woman, a gorgeous boy or a grizzled old man.

Portraiture is, after all, a banker’s art, revived in Tuscany by Giotto in the 14th century and growing hand-in-glove with the nascent international financial system during the 15th. It’s probably only logical that its early subjects would be potential trophy wives, heirs and their patrons. Which prompts a deeper thought about portraiture itself — maybe it could only have become a major genre in an Age of Greed. There is, after all, something intrinsically selfish about lavishing money on an image of yourself or those people who are extensions of your identity.

And yet, how much richer we all are in psychological insight and enduring value for having these works.

Of the 160 paintings, drawings, sculptures and reliefs here, many of them foreign loans never seen in this country, one is almost certainly the most intriguing, and it isn’t even really a portrait: the death mask of Lorenzo the Magnificent. It’s in a gallery that’s devoted to the great banking family, the Medici, and almost accidentally to greed’s twin, fear, which helped spark the revival of accurate portraiture in the first place.

You see, the Medici gallery includes the magnificent portrait in terracotta by Andrea del Verrochio of Lorenzo’s younger brother, Giuliano, who was assassinated during Mass before 10,000 people in the Florence Cathedral at just 24, in an attempt to wipe out the Medici family. Lorenzo escaped with little more than a scratch to go on to become “Il Magnifico,” and Giuliano remained forever after young and handsome — Sandro Botticelli’s posthumous portrait of Giuliano hangs nearby.

Lorenzo killed all the conspirators he could identify, most notably members of the Pazzi family, powerful merchants with links to the Pope. But Lorenzo still was haunted by the attack for the rest of his short life (he died at 43 in 1492), and it was after he regained control that he began encouraging supporters to commission wax portraits of himself and Giuliano as votive monuments in local churches. They were like thank yous to God for the dear leader’s survival, and at the same time advertisements for Lorenzo’s self. The Benintendi family ran a shop in Florence that specialized in this kind of work, much favored by the Medici, and it’s because of this that the death mask is attributed to Orsino Benintendi.

It shows a broken-nosed, bushy-browed, stubbly-faced goblin of a man, and it is like a stubborn corrective to every other portrait we have here. It isn’t so much that Renaissance portraitists flattered their sitters as a rule (some of the greatest, like Mantegna, well-represented here by wonderful charcoals, were known not to flatter so much, and patrons spoke among themselves about this defect).

Purposeful portraits

Portraits had a purpose back then. We, who live in an age when there are far more photos mounted on Facebook than there are in the Library of Congress archives, have a hard time seeing this, but at a time when almost no one had their recognizable visage reproduced, putting one, or several, on display about the town was the power of instant celebrity.

But not aristocracy, exactly. The Medici liked republics because of a republic’s relationship to debt, which is, after all, the essence of the banking business. A king’s debts died with him, but debts guaranteed by a city or a nation — well, as Citibank’s Sandy Weill once put it, “Countries don’t go out of business.” Maybe you won’t get repaid in coin, but there are always taxes to be foregone, or municipal property you could use, or, in a scrape, a war you might want to supply.

Ruling a republic was a very different thing from a monarchy, a more human, negotiable thing (again, the essence of banking might be described as a never-ending negotiation). That’s why so many of the other paintings and sculptures in this show have become iconic symbols: They are pregnant with meaning because they explain the emotion of traditional ties. “Old Man with a Young Boy” by Domenico Ghirlandaio represents a grandfather’s doting affection, though it was originally more like a document of paternity; Botticelli’s ideal beauties, like the busts of marriageable young heiresses by Desiderio da Settignano (favorite sculptor to the Medici’s second generation), have come to represent eternal grace, even though they are really more like 15th-century cheesecake.

All that delayed gratification, the instruments fashioned to pay out over time and the secrecy that ensured their final value, used to lead bankers to have a long-sightedness others did not have. They thought of themselves as human and fragile, at least compared with national debt service, and wanted to ensure their sons would succeed them at the center of their eternal negotiations. Federico da Montefeltro, a mercenary who rose to be the Duke of Urbino, for example, had Pietro di Spagna paint him with his 5-year-old son and put a golden scepter marked “Pontifex” in the boy’s hand to signify his succession.

Because they feared the final summation, the totaling up in the last books, they were terrified of the death they saw coming. And out of this fear they wanted to make some lasting representation of their selves, shown at their very best, the heights of their fortune. It’s the risk, the uncertainty of it all, that drives bankers to extremes — will they live to collect? Who will if they don’t?

And they were right to live in fear, debt’s constant companion. Only recently have scholars figured out, from newly discovered letters in the papal library, that Federico da Montefeltro was the real brains behind the Pazzi Conspiracy, working in connivance with the Pope. Il Magnifico never found out. It was an unknown unknown, and he was right to be afraid. Very afraid.

The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini
Where: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street, New York City
When: Through March 18. Open Tuesdays to Thursdays, 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays, 9:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.; and Sundays, 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Closed today and Jan. 1; closes 4:45 on Saturday.
How much: Recommended admission for adults, $25; seniors, $17; students, $12; children younger than 12 are admitted free. For more information, call (212) 535-7710 or visit metmuseum.org.